Saw The Death of Dick Long (2019), a thriller/mystery film where the details of what actually happened are gradually revealed to us viewers but we do know that something very bad happened during a wild party/hangout session and it wound up with a man seriously injured and his two friends scrambling to cover their tracks. I found it a fairly sad film.
The film bill itself as a crime comedy, and there's a lot of desperate scrambling which could be comical, I guess. I found myself feeling worse and worse for the protagonists (who are the un-injured friends, above) as their lies mount and their bumbling confusion exposes them further and further. The most reliable source of actual laughs for me is a dim-witted lesbian cop who doesn't understand nick-names and is generally harmlessly amusing.
The film is set in a non-specific small-town where people talk in a southern twang. The atmosphere at first seems pleasantly busy but soon becomes oppressively claustrophobic. One shot early on shows the main characters driving past a trio of women sitting at a patio table, and all three women turn to stare at their car as they drive past. Everything they do is watched by bored, baleful, listless eyes. The worst is the main character's daughter. She's supposed to be irritatingly precocious, full of "No, daddy, that's not right. You said [extremely incriminating thing he said] remember?" I was on edge enough. She made my skin crawl.
Anyway, the film certainly held my attention and the payoff when you're allowed to understand what exactly went down is satisfyingly shocking, but somehow I wasn't in the right mood. I felt awful for the poor main characters, trying their damnedest but too dumb and incompetent to be effective, trapped in a hostile and suspicious world. Their panic and grief is given almost Hitchcockian weight, and then they say something like "Oh, we didn't think that one through did we?" Obviously comical, but it made me feel too bad for them to laugh.
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